Noodle Shop
by narooks
Summary: Coffee shop AU (or rather, Noodlery AU - because every ship needs one). In this AU, it is Narook rather than Toza who saves Mako and Bolin from the school of hard knocks. Thus, our fabulous bending brothers grow up instead into the fabulous busboy brothers. Expect family love and a fair bit of Borra. *I SWEAR THIS IS STILL BEING UPDATED, THANKS FOR STICKING WITH ME*
1. Chapter 1

**_Rush-hour introductions for brothers; dead flowers, dying boys_**

He could hardly be called an emotional man, but not a day goes by that Narook doesn't thank his lucky stars for the boys.

He can still remember them as they once were: alley children, chubby-cheeked kiddos burned by gunfire, babyish bodies marked by smoke; they could not read, and yet they were already proficient in the language of gang fights and hidden knives. They were six and eight and they belonged to no one but the toothy, careless, red specter of miserable poverty.

He'd bring them bowls of broth on occasion, a leftover pastry for the younger child (_Bolin, a thumb in his mouth_), piles of newspaper for the older boy to make a fire with (_Mako, lightless eyes_).

That was the year Narook's wife (_long sleeves, quick smile, cutting flowers on the doorstep_) caught the plague, and her diseased fingertips and the pervasive odor of dead blossoms in her clothes kept him too occupied to think of poor urchins. It is difficult, after all, to consider the loss of another when you are sitting at a beloved's deathbed. But as he closed her blank eyes, Narook thought of missed opportunities, the ghosts of a life meant to be shared, a room for two people, for a family. Her innocence lingered with him, long after she was lost, reminding him of Bolin's tiny hands holding Mako's collar, his mewls of hunger. They too had been cheated out of soft heart and solid home, they too mourned the quiet heat of a supportive hand, a palm pressing into the small of their backs, helping them up. Narook went through his empty house, slowly picking up withered panda lilies for a few moments before suddenly chucking them away (_she would be ashamed, seeing me choose dead flowers over dying boys_).

That afternoon he spent four hours looking for Mako and Bolin, finally finding them on the docks, staring out into the still waters of the bay. Mako watched him approach with unconcealed suspicion, tightening his grip on Bolin, but he did not move away.

_Hello. Um, there's a job opening at my noodlery. Two openings, in fact. If you kids are_ _interested._

Narook sees them now, sixteen and eighteen, going about day-to-day life, reveling in the knowledge that the sadness of their black childhood has not embittered them. In fact, if anything, it has softened this pair of luminous boys, guiding them into warm and uncomplicated adolescence. Mako spends the working hours in the kitchen, a plaid apron tied around his waist, measuring out spoonfuls of crushed ginger root in a pot, stirring with a gentle, almost affectionate hand, a soothing, nearly paternal touch. He is quiet and expressionless while he works; he grinds spice, bringing soft, fragrant substance to simple dishes, he follows the steps of a recipe as methodically as he once carried out orders in turf wars.

There's something different about the boyish ex-soldier, though, a certain capacity for lightheartedness that was not there before. For instance—when a customer is pleased with a meal, Bo will boom _"bro! They love it! They really love it!"_ And Mako, sharpening knives in the kitchen, will pause his work to let his head rest against the wall, arms wrapped around his body, unable to suppress a grin of satisfaction, a breathy laugh.

Bolin has grown into broad, bear-like shoulders, reaching to clear tables with adult limbs, and yet he remains a simpleton, a youth like the spring season—breezy, foolish, entirely too kind-hearted. Still, it's impossible to begrudge him this when he is so dimpled and dapper, greeting the regulars with childlike, easy earnestness that bewitches young ladies and housewives alike.

Bo wears a polka-dotted bow tie and slippers with wheels crudely affixed to them—a foolhardy invention of his own design, meant to increase his speed while waiting tables but only succeeding in causing catastrophic, comical collisions. And yet the girls don't seem to mind when Bo topples into their laps, so Narook decides to let him be until he finds a suitable opportunity to nab the shoes (Mako is two steps ahead of him, grabbing his wayward brother and prying the wheels off with a spatula before the next round of customers arrives).

Narook admires one brother for his determination, another brother for his charm, both for their unusual and tremendous tenderness. He sees them sitting side-by-side on a bed, the light from an open window on their faces; Mako picking out the tangles in his brother's hair, Bolin turning a panda lily over in his hand. He is struck by his fondness for them, fondness he didn't think he'd feel again, and when they turn to him (_"g'morning Narook" "hey Mister N!"_), he can't help but smile and think—these are _my boys._


	2. Chapter 2

_**The problems between women and men; enter the devil-may-care damsel**_

Bolin is at his very best in the mornings. A fellow in shined shoes and bow tie, apple-cheeked and doe-eyed, winking at patrons and reading off specials in his most theatrical voice (_got a shipment of mackerel and buckwheat noodles, and it's most stupendous grub, if I do say so myself_). He is a waiter of uncommon excellence, especially skilled in the more personal side of the profession. The years may not have taught Bolin the virtues of adulthood, but at least he knows how to put his buttery, gutsy smile to good use (_"how do you do, sir"—grinning Bo bows low to the small schoolboy twirling his chopsticks at table two_).

A garden variety of Republic City folk frequent Narook's noodlery, making it, at any given time, a miniature model of the outside chock-a-block chaos. Lovelorn poets drowning their sorrows in caribou stew rub shoulders with pro-benders, tea-sipping reformed gangsters argue with newspapermen on break, cultivated noblewomen shoot dubious glances at giggling, slightly drunk youngsters (they are so very different yet at least somewhat similar_—_after all, Bolin's clumsy charisma appeals to all of them).

Most customers come to the shop to admire the subtleties of Narook's homeland cuisine, but a few are there to admire Narook's busboys instead. More often than not there will be a capricious, sly gal hanging around, looking for a shot at Mako, who has something of a reputation among the females of the neighborhood. This kind of treatment is difficult to avoid: at eighteen, Mako possesses both a Casanova's golden eyes and the casual indifference that encourages admirers and heightens the longing of young hearts. The ladies are always ultimately disappointed (_Grumpy_ _Mako waving a spatula:_ _oh spirits, get out of my damn kitchen_), but they stick around. There's good food and good company in the form of Mako's silly brother, who will sometimes perform crude renditions of circus tricks for them (_how many plates can I balance on my head?_)

Bolin doesn't mind being the hired entertainment. The girls at the noodlery are fun, sometimes uproariously so, but he's not concerned with any ulterior motives, not yet. That is not to say he is ignorant of their limber laughter and nimble shape, the patterns of lips and lust that will inevitably occupy adolescent dreaming. But sixteen is old enough to know of women, not appreciate them, and Bolin is too changeable, too distracted by noodlery business (_ain't got time for mushy stuff, Mister N, noodles are kind of my whole life right now_). For better or for worse, girls have never meant more to Bolin than any other customer (_but for how long_, thinks Narook, the voice of experience).

It is approaching noon, peak hour at the shop. A serving tray sitting firmly in his hands, Mako calls out for the whimsical, wayward waiter.

"Bolin! Meal set three, spicy noodles and dumplings for table eleven."

"Ooh, dumplings!" Bolin appears, clapping. He reaches out to touch the pudgy, doughy balls; Mako intervenes by moving swiftly to the side. A brotherly comedy of errors, the funny oaf and the reedy dreamboat, played out in the foggy air of the noodlery. Narook watches them closely, one hand concealing a smile. The comfortable domesticity in their current interactions contrasts so sharply with the depths of dark, childhood hours; their cheerfulness is a miracle in of itself.

"Don't you dare." Mako says sternly, "these are _not_ for you."

Bolin pouts. His brother, however, has planned for this eventuality. After all, Mako is nothing if not prepared.

"Don't fuss, I made you an extra." Mako opens his fist, revealing a perfectly folded dumpling as though offering up a white lotus, a ripening fruit, to some inquisitive arboreal mammal. "Try not to gulp it down, I don't want a repeat of last week's choking incident."

"You're the best big brother ever!"

"Yeah, yeah," Mako says, attempting to sound aloof but not entirely able to keep the satisfaction from his voice. He slides the serving tray into his Bo's arms. "Now get going."

Bolin surveys the room, hands on his hips, foot tapping along to some jazzy tune in his head. Noodles and dumplings for table eleven: a family of three, a long-haired mother telling some unheard joke, a laughing father reaching over to clean a baby's face. He lingers a little longer than he should around them, though it would easier and kinder to look away (he looks at the baby with undisguised fondness: _you're in good hands, kiddo, hope you always stay that way_).

He looks up and spots a table he hasn't popped by yet. The far right corner, one occupied chair, a pair of legs, ankles crossed neatly together, a menu obscuring a face. Someone who hasn't ordered yet.

Perhaps it is the midday heat, perhaps it is the mystery in long limbs and hidden hair, but he is possessed by a sudden and intense curiosity (as though stumbling through the forest and parting transparent flower stems and branches to find the vague and sleepy coastline, as though awakening from a soon-forgotten dream).

The menu drops to the table—a foreign profile, chin up, a girl, a pair of eyes turning to look at him, filling his field of vision with the illusion of blue ocean expanse. Her lips curve into a wolfish smile (Bo slows momentarily, gulps automatically; lamb and lioness, the good boy meets lady danger). And he suddenly has to remind himself that girls aren't any different from other mortals, oh no siree, but he's never seen skin so dark and smooth, like a new spring plum, he's never seen an expression quite so candid, like she could chew him up and spit him back out, like she could take anything he could dole out, and where is this strange rush coming from, the roof of his mouth caving in?

The summer of his sixteenth year, a part of Bolin (the part that believes in noodles rather than infatuation) finally concedes defeat.

He steps up. "Hey there, pony tail."

An answering breath of laughter, shoulders rolling back (_oh, let's see if I can make her laugh like that again,_ a promise of things yet to come). "Hi, bow tie."

And this is how Bolin meets Korra.


	3. Chapter 3

_**Five o'clock; toxic animals of loneliness and the heroines who defeat them**_

It is nearly closing time. The summertime heat grows progressively stronger despite the darkening hours, enticing glowing insects from underground hovels, forcing groggy birds into cool street corners. Somewhere, a radio plays, a mother opens a windows to holler for her child (_"c'mon , can't I stay two more minutes?" "Young lady, I swear by Tui and La, if you don't come here I'll feed your dinner to the koala sheep._")

Bolin, a sheen of sweat coloring his brow, loosens his bow tie and runs one hand through his tangled hair. Mako and Narook are at the market two streets over, picking out produce and prodding the greengrocer for bargains (Mako, ever the tactful teenage negotiator, is especially talented at this). For now, Bolin is alone.

He is no stranger to solitude, but this familiarity has not made him fond of it. During his years as a street urchin, he would be left by himself for hours, watching the sun trace a lazy arc in the sky from an alleyway, fingers crossed for Mako to come back. Loneliness became habitual, an inky tattoo on his shoulder blades, a shadow that dogged him, a permanent creature in the center of his diaphragm—but he never welcomed it.

Even now, as he approaches the age of responsibility, he cannot bear to be alone. He misses the comfort of human presence as though it were a biological imperative, essential for his working heart. Humor, hustle and bustle, heat from the kitchen stove, where Mako stands: these are the things Bolin craves. He needs the company of others, the tawdry winks and cheap jokes, to assure himself of his position in the world. Without this, on his own, Bolin is at a loss. He is comfortable with anyone—with anyone, that is, but himself.

Bolin hears approaching footsteps, the sound of someone parting the curtain at the noodlery's entryway; he feels immediately and acutely grateful. A final customer, a reason to step back into his familiar role, the trademark smile, the artful clowning around. When he notices who it is, his smile widens, becoming more sincere, losing some of the glib, happy-go-lucky waiter falsity. It's the blue-eyed rapscallion, the devilish damsel from a few days back, walking in as though the shop belonged to her in some abstract way, as though she were a queen returning to her territory to collect the spoils of war.

"Hey, this place is still open, right?"

Bolin looks around the empty shop slowly, purposefully, stroking a proverbial beard.

"Hm. Doesn't look like there's much room," he says pleasantly, "but I'll make an exception just for you."

"So kind of you."

"Don't tell anyone, though. We're not supposed to pick favorites."

_Your favorite_, she thinks, the words loosening her up, like stepping into a warm bath. She presses her forefinger to her lips, eyes on him. "Ha, it'll be our secret."

A _secret_, some kind of intimacy between them, the waiter and the stranger, now conspirators, accomplices, comrades in the making. This is unknown and foreign to Bolin, who has met thousands of people but never befriended any, never had _secrets. _And though he does not know it, it is perplexing to her too. And yet they both find it nice—sharing these wily yet guileless grins, these tones of near affection (_especially if it's with this dark-haired, gutsy and never gutted gal; especially if it's with this clumsy, chuckling waiter boy, gotta say, I've never seen that shade of green eyes before_).

"So what have you got today?" She slides into an empty chair, fingers drumming on the table.

"Um. Well, our cook is out, so I'll have to check what we've got in the kitchen."

"Okay. Bring out anything, I'm not picky. Actually, bring out_ everything_ you've got."

"Everything?"

"Well, maybe not _everything_, but as much as you can carry. I can eat a lot."

Bolin laughs, finding it impossible to deny her this. He acquiesces with a dramatic bow and retreats to the kitchen, gathering bowls of leafy vegetables, lotus root, Mako's special marinated lake trout, thick noodles, sweet and sour pulled pork. A practiced expert, he balances the plates on one tray held aloft, earning a look of appreciation from her.

"Here you are, miss champion eater," Bolin says.

"Not that I mind being called a champion, but the name's Korra."

"_Korra._" He tries the name out, two strange, yet not unpleasant (no, definitely not _unpleasant_) syllables skimming through his mouth and slipping off his tongue as simply as a breath, a face with this new name hidden in his throat. "I'm Bolin. Just call if you need anything, okay?"

He turns to go: she sees a solid back, curved inwards, (_he's big_) reminding her of the enormous blue icebergs of her childhood, the way they rose up and above her, dwarfing her. And yet they they were never frightening, not with their transparent cores that filtered and split the light into an array of colors. She senses that he's like that, too: broad-shouldered, large hands, but a jellyfish-soft, clear-as-day heart. Korra decides he's not going to go, not just yet.

"Hey," she says, "why don't you sit down?" She gestures to the empty chair.

"Me? Sit down? Here? With you?"

"Yeah, unless you've got something better to do." Her voice softens, a most surprising development. "It'd be nice to talk to someone. It's more fun when you've got someone with you. You know what I mean, Bolin?"

The green-eyed busboy pauses, confused and then privately thrilled. She is asking specifically for him, he is not some interchangeable comedian, but rather _Bolin_, someone she wants to talk to. And her words mirror his ancient anxieties so perfectly he can't help wonder at the coincidence, at this young woman who has single-handedly done away with his uneasiness (_the loneliness in the pit of his gut begins to lose some of its grip on him_). There's an intense, almost powerfully sacred quality to her, as though she occupies more space than others. In fact, it's as though she occupies the entire room with her bright eyes and slim hands. Or perhaps what she occupies is the entirety of his mind and waking thoughts.

"No problem. It'd be a crying shame to leave you alone, Korra."

A smile of relief, cheerful noodle-eating, hair-pulling (_it's just too fun, you have three pony tails_), side-splitting laughter, late-evening anecdotal adolescent talk, _wanna have a staring content and who ever wins gets the last bit of trout_, different versions of the same thought, youngsters in sync:

_Looks like I finally_—

Belle and busboy, good kid and rebel, sharing looks, cracking grins.

—_made a friend._


	4. Chapter 4

**_Ace of hearts and king of clubs; my big bro ain't scared of anything_**

During quiet evenings, before settling in for the night, Narook and the brothers play Ba Sing Se Bluff. It's a simple card game requiring both subtlety and a decent poker face, in which players must dispose of their cards through careful deceptions. Needless to say, Mako is reigning champ, and Bolin is awful to the point of absurdity. But he is a cheerful loser (_I'll get back at you later, bro_), and Mako is not a braggart (_spirits above, please do not hide my spatula again, Bo_). Neither would allow competition to spoil their few hours of good fun.

They sit around a table in the back room of the shop, trading stories about their day like schoolchildren swap tiger-eye marbles. Mako comments on recipe modifications, the fruit that is out of season; Bolin lists the shop's regulars, the jokes he's told them. When Mako talks, Bolin becomes more serious than usual, nodding in time with his brother's more emphatic pronouncements (_"we need more bell peppers if we're to keep up with current demand"_). Bolin's quips and anecdotes make Mako grin, a rare occurrence indeed (_"d'you know, bro, I fell asleep without closing the window, and when I woke up, there was dew in my room!"_)

Casual visitors to the noodlery sometimes remark that, physically and temperamentally, the boys hardly seem related at all. But in these moments (their heads so close together, eyes alight), Narook finds the suggestion that they are not brothers impossible to entertain.

"You seem extra happy, Bolin," says Mako, dealing out the cards, his red scarf draped over the arm of his chair.

"Yeah? Maybe it's 'cause I made a friend, today!"

"Is that right?" Narook looks up in mild surprise. Customers are always just customers to Bolin, no matter how quickly he takes to them. He sometimes refers to them with affectionate nicknames (the trio of girls who pursue Mako with wanton abandon are "bro's fangirls", the councilman who never tips is "Turd-lok"), but they remain in the realm of cursory professionalism, they are never his _friends_.

Mako seems to have picked up on this as well; he leans forward, intrigued.

"What's your friend like?"

"Oh, well, she's really fun, and tough, and interesting, and she's Water Tribe, like you, Mister N."

"Water Tribe, huh? You don't say. What's her name?"

"Korra."

Mako stiffens. He brings his fingertips to his temples, looking like an exasperated housewife who can't figure out how to trim her magnolia tree, or how to properly discipline her biscuit-snatching, fast-running offspring.

"Oh spirits, Bolin."

"What? What's wrong?"

"Do you not pay attention to the paper _at all_?"

"Well, I like the Sunday comics, but that's kind of it?"

Mako leaves the room for a moment, returning with an old copy of the newspaper. He flips through it hurriedly, exclaims _aha!_ when he locates a certain page and points at it.

"Is this her?"

Bolin looks down curiously. There's a black and white photograph of yes, it _is_ Korra, arms crossed across her chest, winking at the camera, the waters of Yue Bay at her back. The headline reads: _Avatar Korra arrives at Republic City, catch the next issue for a shocking tell-all interview!_

"Oh. _Oh_. Avatar Korra. The _Avatar_."

Mako groans, bunching his scarf between his hands nervously. "Leave it you to get involved with the craziest, most dangerous person in the city."

"Oh, c'mon bro, she's not dangerous."

"Oh, no, not at all, she can just summon a tsunami and a landslide and a firestorm at will and all at the same time, that's not dangerous at all, and _to think_ that I use to worry about leaving you in Red Monsoon territory, at least they could only bend _one_ element—"

Mako blusters about, hands flapping, red in the face. Bolin and Narook look at each other and smile knowingly. This is Mako when he discovers his prized pink apricots are rotting in the sun, when he gets to the butcher's too late and all the good cuts of meat are gone, when he carries in a pigeon with a broken leg (_can you fix it, Narook, can you fix it, please_). Mako, boy king of his own tightly controlled world, is unable to stomach unpredictability, mountainous swells interrupting the smooth stretch of his lands (it's funny, then, that he's got _let's-try-this-just-for-the-heck-of-it_ Bolin for a brother).

"It'll be fine, Mako," Narook pats him on the arm fondly, "she must be an alright gal, and Bolin could learn a thing or two from a strong-willed lady, right?"

Mako looks at Bolin's face, frowning at the encouraging grin. His green-eyed charge, his silly, sweet brother in the bow tie. _Agni, I'm too old to keep fighting tooth and nail to keep you alive, Bo. _

Maybe it's time for the younger to take leave of the older. Maybe the soft-eyed tenderfoot will stand up on his own (and who better to help than a quicksilver hooligan, who better to give him a hand than the keeper of the world entire?)

"Hey, Mako," Bolin says, wanting to reassure him, "you know what, next time she comes, I'll introduce you, how's that? And then we can all be friends!"

Mako shrugs noncommittally, looking away, hands twisting in his lap. Well. He should get a good look at her, make sure she's not the troublesome sort. And she might not be. After all, anyone Bolin likes this much can't possibly be bad, right? Yeah. That's right. He looks at the newspaper again, smoothing his hands over it, pressing out the wrinkles and veins of ink that split through her body; he studies the half-lidded eyes, imagining the peculiar shade of blue they must be. _We can all be friends._


	5. Chapter 5

_**Texture and substance in a strange feeling; boys and girls up to no good**_

Korra and Bolin sit side by side on the tiled floor, divvying up the contents of a burlap bag (the day's uneaten dumplings) between the both of them. The afternoon light from outside eases its way through the partially closed windows, illuminating and warming these two children as they count out the bounty they are each due.

Narook had brought them the bag, releasing Bolin from his duties a little early so he could split the food with Korra in the back-room (_"how'd you kids feel about some dumplings? My treat? Oh, it's nothing at all, just some left-overs, don't worry about it. In fact, it was the brooding boy in the kitchen's idea. He's busy right now, but why don't you go thank him some other day? He'd like to meet you, but he's kind of shy. Alright? Alright."_)

Bolin bends over, picking up the dumplings in twos, silently weighing them in his hand, making sure to give her the heaviest of each pair. He is not typically this methodical; Bolin goes about his usual responsibilities with a casualness that borders on unintentional carelessness. But he takes a certain pride in tasks that involve her, his only (and therefore his best) friend. Korra can't read these details in his behavior; her womanly instinct is not fleshed out enough to decipher the patterns of unconscious, half-formed, still-growing affection in his mannerisms. And besides, her attention is otherwise occupied—recently she has developed a strange fascination with the male form, and she is taking advantage of the occasion to stare openly at him.

Korra is intensely and unabashedly curious of men (she is a seventeen-year-old who spent puberty in sheltered seclusion, after all). The movements of his large and calloused hands, the structure of his back, the mussed-up hair (_is it soft, it looks soft_), the slope of his jawline: she observes and commits it all to memory like she once did bending forms. But there's an enthusiasm in her study of Bolin that goes beyond scholarly purism. There's some perplexing fear in it too (resting somewhere in her, somewhere perilously close to her heart)—it is as though she is searching through grey mist for something, but what?

Her thoughts come to a standstill as Bolin reaches the bottom of the bag and pulls out the last dumpling with a flourish.

"That one's mine," Korra says, playfully enough that he feels compelled to contest her, to prod her into a little innocent competition.

"Yeah? Well, I want it too. What'cha goin' do about it, little lady? Wanna fight for it?" he drawls, gangster-style, flashing her his best come-hither grin.

She takes the bait. This busboy doesn't know what he's up against, and she plans to inform him. "Sure. You. Me. Arm wrestling."

Korra offers her hand to him; they interlace their fingers. Her grip is formidable, as unyielding as she, but the brush of her wrist feels surprisingly intimate, as does the way her palm shapes itself around the curve of his hand, the pinpricks of her translucent, half-moon nails. He can see the map of thin, bluish veins that pulsates under the delicate skin of her inner arm, the creases and crenulations around her knuckles. This contact is functional, never emotional, meant only for the purpose of a petty adolescent show-down, a skirmish between children. Functional, never emotional, but does Bolin blush like a bashful bride (_oh yes, yes he does_).

He doesn't have time to consider all the implications; as soon as they touch, Korra pulls him down with all of her considerable strength. His arm hits the floor in two seconds flat (the outcome he'd expected, for sure, but still he looks at her open-mouthed. The sunlight in her hair, the blue of her darkened eyes, her sinewy body leaning forward towards him—she could be a goddess of war, dispatching her victims with a power beyond mortal ken).

"I've got you," she says, not without a sense of triumph.

"Y-yeah," he hiccups.

"Want me to teach you what I did? There's a trick to it."

The conquering empress passing down her sword to the smallish squire. He smiles, and the genuine admiration in his expression renders even this battle-ready girl warrior momentarily defenseless.

He reaches up to grip her hand again, stronger this time. Now it is Korra's turn to blush, suddenly conscious of the heat of his hand, as though some far-away sun were hidden in his fingertips _._

"Yeah." he says softly, eyes on her (_green-eyed glance in grey mist)._"Teach me."


	6. Chapter 6

_**Summer day deliveries; the light of a thousand lives**_

It takes an hour and a half to teach an Avatar how to ride a bicycle, but easily twice that to convince her to obey traffic laws (and even then she is not above pulling slapdash U-turns amid a flock of Satomobiles, zipping down slopes and filling the air with laughter like liquid, a silver river from the mouth of the reincarnated queen).

It is summer day like a line of poetry, like the trembling gaze of a beloved, and they are two teenagers with eyes bright as sea glass, as spring grass. Korra's got her hands on the handlebars, and Bolin's got his hands on her shoulders, hanging on for dear life. They're cutting it too close on their delivery schedule, but still hedonistic, pleasure-seeking Korra drops off the main road and takes the scenic route along Yue Bay. The mountains ripple and gleam at their back, the selfsame constructions of rock that have seen all of Korra's past lives (and lovers). It's easy for an adolescent Avatar to believe herself immortal, but it is not she that will remain in the memories of the world, but rather the strength of her feeling (_a hundred years from now, an incipient and nomadic Avatar will pass by this road and be seized by vague, dreamlike recollection: a yellow bicycle, an afternoon in the sun, greenest eyes. For it is love rather than brawn that survives the test of time_).

Bolin keeps her entertained with running commentary on the delights of Republic City, his voice in her ear constant despite the changing landscape. His breath on her neck is an unsettling but thrilling warmth that travels through her, propelling her down the road.

"Hey, Korra!" His grip on her tightens; she grins, exhilarated in some familiar yet unidentifiable way.

"Yeah?"

"Look to your right, quick! No, your other right!"

She glances towards his pointing finger just in time to catch it—a field of sunflowers growing atop a hillside, a burst of yellow like a sudden torrent of tropical birds or a mango splitting open in her fingers (_poignant and surprising, all sweetness_).

Korra can wrap herself in scarlet, sacred fire, she can raise up the visceral heart of the earth, she can rip through black water, she is an Avatar of ferocious power—but she's never known a yellow like this, never like _this_. She is, after all, the product of seventeen years' worth of iceberg blue and starless polar sky, there are many colors that remain unknown to her. She stares at this newfound _yellow_ as though witnessing a miracle, as though she were an exile looking upon home.

Korra is something akin to a God, but it seems even Gods such as she can be surprised. And isn't the mortal capable of stirring a God to this extent something of a marvel, himself?

They are late, terribly late, with their deliveries. They have forgotten the complementary chopsticks, the noodles lie in sorry, soggy heaps. But the customers don't say anything. They are too disarmed by the messy hair and grins of the adolescent bicyclists at their doorstep to complain. They watch as they race down the street; Korra's hair out of its customary ties, blowing in the wind, Bolin throwing his hands up in the air, the both of them in fits of laughter, looking as if they could take on anything, anything at all.

"_Hey Ma? I think the Avatar just brought our noodles?"_

_"__Damn it all, Lee, you have got to lay off the cactus juice."_


	7. Chapter 7

_**An unlikely pair, a likely story; the busboy turned magician**_

Korra is as hot-headed as Mako is high-strung; both are almost sickeningly stubborn. Small wonder then, that not three minutes after their first meeting they are arguing.

"You can't just use brown seaweed, that's _so_ unauthentic."

"Oh, _really_?"

"Yes, _reee-ally_."

Bolin leans against the wall, biting his lip. Normally time spent here is mild and merciful, a hushed respite characterized by the combined fragrances of garlic, sesame oil and rice noodles. Mako's gentle diligence in the kitchen is a balm to Bolin, when he is rubbed raw by the day's labor and dead on his feet. There's something impossibly sweet in this eighteen-year-old cook who, with almost alchemical flair, gathers and ties down ingredients to the plate, recreating the nostalgia and tenderness of a far-away glacial home, a blue-eyed culture.

But he is not so sweet now, though, this brother of his—Mako crushes slices of ginger with the flat of his knife, arms stiff, making faces like a petulant child. Korra has violated all the laws of common courtesy by intruding into _his_ territory (Mako may have been robbed of his boyhood by circumstance but he has never been fully disabused of juvenile notions like _"this is my territory"_). He is as soothed by the regularity of rules as beasts are by song, and considers her unsolicited and unpredictable criticisms a capital offense.

"Well, I don't suppose you have a better alternative?"

"Yeah, of course! Use the red stuff."

"Are you crazy?" Mako says, mortified, the lanky monk pointing fingers at the girlish heathen. "You can't use red seaweed with this, it's _caribou_ broth."

"Hey buddy, I'm Water Tribe, I know my stuff." Korra rolls her eyes at him (_what a kid_, Mako thinks, even though he's perfectly aware of the similarity between their ages).

"Uh-huh, but have you been cooking Water Tribe food every day for the past ten years?"

"What's that got to do with _anything_?"

Korra has always believed herself entitled to the admiration merited by her past lives. But Mako doesn't seem to care that, in another incarnation, she championed conquests and crushed continents. He seems to consider her with marked disinterestedness that borders on condescension, a reaction that only serves to fuel Korra's propensity for outrage. She glares at him, baiting the boy in this adolescent hunt for empty supremacy.

Bolin frowns. This is why he'd dallied so long in formally introducing his brother to the Avatar; he is well-versed in both the dialect of Mako's disciplined, peevish insistence and the slippery jargon of Korra's stormy volatility; he is aware of the controversies the differences in their temperament could cause.

Still, he could never have imagined they would be fighting over _the color of algae_.

The absurdity of the situation makes adequate resolution difficult, but Bolin's not about to admit defeat. _They will be buds whether they like it or not,_ he swears to himself, pouting. _Now what do I do to fix this._

"I'm just saying, you need a certain culinary—"

"You can take your culinary _whatever_ and shove it up a komodo rhino's—"

Bolin decides that prompt intervention is necessary, and there's no moment like the present. He plucks a canister of green sheets of seaweed from a shelf and, stepping neatly between the pair, dumps the entirety of its contents inside Mako's pot.

"There. Problem solved," he announces with gusto, grinning at the mirror images of disbelief on the faces of both Avatar and cook-in-training.

"Bolin, _what_? Green seaweed with caribou broth? That's not part of traditional Water Tribe cuisine!" Mako splutters.

"Well, make something up. We can call it _Bolinese_ Noodles. Noodles _à la Bolin_."

"Noodles with a side of Bolin," offers Korra, her irritation vanishing at Bolin's silly quips (Bolin, it seems, is a magician of some caliber, transforming a warmongering Avatar's ill humor into air with a turn-of-phrase and flick of the wrist).

Bolin grins fiendishly. "Well, _everyone_ wants a slice of Bolin."

Mako and Korra laugh in near perfect unison, the sound so at odds with the blows of their heated exchange that it sobers them immediately. They look at each other in surprise and then blush (reddish color seeping in like ink on a page, fire in a forest); suddenly they become painfully cognizant of how silly they've been acting. Korra shrugs her shoulders at Mako (_a truce?_), Mako nods in compliance (_yeah, I've been stupid, sorry_).

Bolin smiles. He ropes an arm around each of their shoulders, bonking their heads together with perhaps more exuberance than the situation calls for (_but this is Bo, after all, cheery busboy extraordinaire, and is Mako chuckling a little, yep, he sure is, so it's all worth it_).

"There we go. That's much better."


	8. Chapter 8

_**Companions for champions, secret ingredients; what Korra doesn't know**_

It is a goldenrod summer's day in Republic City, abuzz with the humming of engines and the roars of dimpled children, not a cloud in sight. An Avatar strolls idly down main street, biting into a pan-fried sea prune nabbed for cheap from a vendor (_here, these are from your home, right? Have one, half-price. Naw, it's alright. Seen you 'round with Bolin, having a nice time in the city? Good, good._)

Korra stretches one arm up over her head, reveling in the bittersweet, rumbling heat, veins of sunlight reaching towards her, warming the roots of her hair, her fingertips. Pema has given her an air acolyte's ceremonial robe to wear, a tunic of deep orange silk embroidered with lotus flowers in pomegranate red.

"It's much too hot for your other clothes, sweetheart," Pema had said, brushing the hair away from Korra's forehead, the godmother beckoning to the forgotten princess. "And look how pretty you are."

In an inner room of the temple, Pema had watched Korra turn hesitantly towards her reflection, blush suffusing her young face. Here was the perennial caretaker of a naked world, a reincarnated lion-heart—Korra of opal glory and quicksilver motion, Korra of gritty grace and unforgiving command. Here the Avatar stood, biting her lip, shy and terribly, terribly embarrassed by her own beauty. Pema had placed a hand on the small of her back, watching the bloom of Korra's hesitant smile; in the way of all pensive, motherly women, she had wondered: _who would you be, if you had been born a little later, just a little later? Who would you be, if not an Avatar?_Hot-blooded Korra swathed in red-yellow, picking at the hems of a dress, flushing like a bride, a warrior, a girl, too._Who are you, little Korra?_

But Korra is seventeen, and it is an unfortunate consequence of both her age and upbringing that discerning her identity does not take precedence over _how many bad guys can I beat up in two minutes flat_. For better or for worse, she is blind to all that is not bound to her role as the Avatar.

This role is both reverie and responsibility; she is as much a spirit's shadow as she is mankind's messiah. She is an old god, born on mortal soil for the benefit of mortal suffering. There are temples of burnished gold in her name, there are hell fire wars fought on her word. The universe owes Korra its safety, in her hands it places the tender care of its equilibrium. In return it takes from her everything it can get. Blood, bones, guts, love—it owns all of it, all of her.

Korra knows this. She is familiar with her task; those burdens of the past and duties of nature that direct her. She grew up with the previous Avatar's wife and a company of soldiers dedicated to the protection of her title, she was fed on folktales of _Kyoshi_ the splitter of islands, _Aang_ the bringer of peace. But she—sly-smiling, slow-skipping Korra dilly-dallying down the streets, licking her fingers—is not worried. Why would she be? In return for compliance with her duty, Korra receives real, raw power. It is power as ferocious as the churning, red-hot viscera of the earth, as age-old as glowing star stuff. She delights in it as she delights in the loveliness of this summer day.

Korra rounds the corner, heading towards Narook's noodlery. Mako has promised to let her and Bolin taste-test new additions to the menu, and she's been looking forward to it all week. She's nearly there when she spots (_lo and behold!_) her own green-eyed, button-nosed busboy.

She starts to call to him, but something in his manner stops her. He's walking quickly, too quickly for untroubled, stop-and-smell-the-flowers, bow-tie Bolin. He's got a burlap bag in his arms, carrying it with gentle caution, like a mother would an infant.

Korra grins, feeling suddenly intensely and unabashedly curious. _Got a secret, huh, Bolin?_She follows the boy down four blocks, occasionally ducking behind a fire hydrant or a streetlamp to avoid detection (_"what in the name of the spirits is that funny girl doing" thinks the elderly man watching her from a stoop_). Luckily Bolin is neither a master of subterfuge nor particularly attentive to his surroundings; Korra goes unnoticed.

Up and over hills, underneath bridges, through tunnels, all the way to a part of town Korra doesn't know (later she'll ask Tenzin; he'll frown and say "the slums, I think, sad place, what were you doing there, Korra?")

They end up in an alleyway shrouded in black warmth and shadow, the detritus of city life decaying in the dirt like a shipwreck on the sea, like sediment collecting on clean valleys: cardboard boxes and green bottle glass, concrete slabs and sharp yellow metal rusted through; and, in a corner, out of sight, a crowd of (_oh spirits_) young children.

They are between the ages of six and twelve, babies tossed out and broken down, hands hidden in sleeves too big, cheeks painted with the iron of blood, the violet of bruise. But Bolin goes to them with a grin, the slightest skip in his step.

"Hey, kids!" he says, waving, like an exile returning home, as though calling to brethren, fellows from a selfsame brood, children of a city's selfish womb.

Immediately they react, welcoming him with a cheer; a boy throws up his cap in the air. Korra ducks behind a crumbling wall, watching from the dark.

A little creature, a girl with amber eyes and two missing teeth, breaks away from the group and runs to Bolin; he swoops her up, all smiles.

"Look, I brought bean buns. You like those, right?"

She nods purposefully, solemnly, a miniature queen agreeing to a knight's oath. Bolin sets her down (_was bow-tie always that gentle_) and produces a perfectly round bun from the bag. He extends one arm and holds it out to her.

The way he moves—that yielding curve of his arm going to the child, motion like a river splitting the landscape—it reminds her suddenly and powerfully of bending forms. It is an extension of an arm that, if she were to perform it, would release a stream of hypnotizing, golden fire. But he opens his hand and there is no changeable blaze in his palm, only a round, white bun. The street child looks at him with wide eyes and then, slowly, she smiles. It's a small adjustment in expression, a look thousands of people wear everyday, but in this girl it is a kind of metamorphosis, transforming the pain of her days into simple beauty (_these outstretched hands, this simple offering_). Korra stops breathing, she finds herself thinking: _what kind of power is that. What kind of power could make someone happy like that. Spirits, wouldn't it be nice if I could—_

"T'hanks, daddy," the street child says softly. She doesn't know any better. To her, _dad_means companion, caretaker, a friend in black nights, and she doesn't have any other word for this young man.

Korra sinks to the ground, shaking (_oh, oh, no, spirits_). A moment built from fragmentary glances, composing an image, birthing the brimming compassion in Korra that is as much her birthright as bending: Bolin's face constricted with emotion, his hands cupping a child's dirtied cheek (_spirits, was he always this gentle_).

Bolin laughs. "You can call me Bo, alright?" He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "That's what all my buds call me. So now we're buds."

She nods in acceptance. "Buds," she repeats, testing the word out.

"Yeah, that's it. Here, now share this with the rest, okay?"

Bolin plops down between a pair of foundlings, ruffling their hair; he laughs at their jokes, at their retellings of the week's events, he rubs the dirt from their noses, tickles their bellies; he pulls faces and performs silly tricks, coaxing laughter from them like a magician pulling out colored scarves, _well, are the bean buns any good, aren't you a sweet little child._

_Power_—not fire, nor rock, nor water; the ability to make an orphan smile, the gift of half a dozen bean buns, the capacity for love that gives the world enough momentum for another turn, another spin in starless space. Eyes closed, Korra remembers a life not her own: lips pressed to a blue arrow, a kiss for all those wounds, the courage of a woman to bring a boy to life. _Power_—she has it all, she has it _all_—but she has never been for anyone what Bolin is to that little girl, to these little children.

Korra looks at her hands, turns them over. Korra is lithe limbs threaded with undercurrents of earthy hues, eyes like ocean-side view, a heart tested by trials of fire. She has never apologized for the strength she's been given, this power that ebbs and rushes through her body. But now she sees that she's never given it the right use, either.

She sits in the dirt, orange silk pooling around her, listening to Bolin's laughter. She brings her hands to her face and, for the first time, she does not ask _can I do this_. She thinks of all she has been given, a millennium's worth of divine power, and she thinks, her heart throbbing in her chest: _for whom can I do this_.


	9. Chapter 9

_**Wolfish working girl; an exile finally coming home**_

Korra sits cross-legged on the floor, a fountain pen hanging from her mouth like a gangster's fat cigar, sheets of yellowing newspaper fanning out around her. She leans forward, her fingertips running across the raised print as though she were directing ink the way she does water.

This mercurial misfit doodles in the margins of the paper, stopping occasionally to decorate an unlucky politician's mug with a mustache. But eventually she reminds herself of her task (_come on, Korra, finish what you've started_) and she begins her search through the newspaper with renewed interest. She circles words and underlines phrases with all her youthful enthusiasm, the nib of her pen sometimes ripping through and leaving pitch-black pinpricks on the tile.

But her eagerness yields the desired results; Korra finds what she is looking for. She gets up, ink seeping through the crevices of her palms like rivers on the secret map of her hands, and grins with satisfaction.

"She asked for a week off," Tenzin tells his wife the next morning, when Pema points out Korra's absence. "She's been working hard, and I thought it might be good for her. Perhaps a few days of relaxation will help her overcome her block."

Pema smiles a little, slowly bringing a teacup to her lips. She asks herself if her husband has seen the newspaper pages under Korra's bed; she wonders if he knows about the markings on yesterday's edition of _Republic City Daily_ (wanted section, second column: _Earthbenders needed urgently for construction_ _project_).

She looks out the window, tracing the city skyline with her dark and knowing gaze, keeping quiet; she is not a woman to betray the intentions of her own kind without due reason. And Pema can still picture the child in the mirror, Korra dressed in orange and pomegranate, blue eyes like the core of a searching, searing storm. Let Korra figure this out on her own; let her chase this down—whatever _this_ may be.

Currently, _this_ means convincing the surveyor at downtown that Korra is, in fact, capable of taking on the job opening at the construction site.

"This ain't a job for a kid," he tells Korra.

"But I'm not just any _kid_, you know," she answers, raising one eyebrow. "I'm the Avatar."

"What makes you think that matters? Avatar or not, you're still a kid."

They face one another, arms crossed: the deity and the common man, hero and heathen. Korra the wolf-god has bared her teeth and claws, but the blue collar non-believer could hardly care less.

Korra huffs (_spirits,_ _is she actually pouting,_thinks the disgruntled surveyor). She doesn't understand why her usual approach isn't working, but it clearly isn't and she's not going to get another shot at this. She takes a deep breath, remembering Tenzin's discrete and strategic delicacy, and attempts a more diplomatic angle.

"Hey, listen. I know this must be strange, but I'm a really talented earthbender. I'm exceptionally talented, in fact. So you should at least give me a chance."

"_Exceptionally_ talented is rather a large claim."

Korra rolls her eyes. She clenches her fists, throws her arms up and then pulls her elbows in, a fast and fluid strike, from the midday midair to her ribcage, her strength traveling from her body to the gut of the earth, yanking a slab of rock out of the grasp of six earthbenders and tossing it a distance of twenty feet.

"Well? What do you say to that?" Korra smirks.

"That was very irresponsible, you could have hurt someone."

"No, I mean, I'm _good_. I'm really good. I can help you."

_I can help you._ His incredulity turns into interest as he hears this plea in her voice and watches the look on her face turn tender and plaintive; she reminds him of a martyr bent in prayer, a challenger begging for a shot at a sacred dream. Well, he too has been young and bold, and seeing this in a growing generation is charming, in a way. He'd rather misplace in his trust in a foolish hopeful than crush her by sending her away.

"You get a trial run, understand? And only because I'm low on workers and it's peak season, I ain't doing you any favors. If you slow my team down you're out. Understand?"

Korra nods solemnly. "Got it."

Day in and day out, it is hard going, moving underneath this churning sun, the heat emanating from stone and mortar; it is pitiless work, hours of sinking into dirt and tearing it from the backbone of the earth, raising it up from an ancient pit and molding it into the products of human need. Even Korra, who bends as she breathes, finds it exhausting. But she never comes close to caving; she draws power from both muscles and memory (_a round white bun, a boy, I can help, that is my purpose, too_. _I can catch up to you. Wait for me, Bolin_).

Around her are working men, pulling and eating away at brick with practiced hands and calloused courage. At first they are indifferent to her presence, unsure what to do with this blue-eyed slip of a child that has dropped in on them as suddenly and forcefully as a change in the weather. But they grow accustomed to her, appreciative of her willingness, adapting her into their routines.

Korra learns to shed her boots like them and roam the soil barefoot, deepening her connection to the earth from which she was born. She listens to their instructions thoughtfully, watching them care for the reddish stone, holding the earth closer than most; she learns from these proletarians what masters never thought to teach her: honest love for work, for her craft. They let her sit by them at meal times, sharing with her slices of tofu and halves of rolls hand-carved out of wheat and soy by their wives. On rare occasions they will even laugh at her adolescent quips and confide in her memories of their own children, tidbits of their own lives.

Hours pass; Korra watches the building go up with fascination. She knows how to open up craters, how to take out mountains—but she's never been the creator of something as simple as four walls, a roof to keep out the rain, a house for a little family. She can't help but feel pleased; she stares at her own two hands with blooming pride.

Legend belongs to Avatars, but homes are forged by working men. And she's slowly finding that the second category is more compelling to her than the first.

At the end of each day, a string of women appear at the construction site; dressed in factory uniforms and aprons, cradling infants and burlap bags of rice. The men raise their heads and spot them; they wash their hands and lean down to kiss their foreheads, to help them with the burden of babies, of bags. They leave like pairs of birds, disappearing around corners, hands brushing like tips of feather-light wings.

Korra watches them go with lightless eyes, an unknown and unhappy feeling budding in her throat. A childhood in a compound has made her hard against the desire for human company. But she sees them go and her heart cannot help but recall the smoke of a noodle shop kitchen, a yellow delivery bicycle, green—

"_Korra!_"

As though answering her half-formed call, as though heeding the directions of secret cartography, as though following a path laid down in red string—Bolin is there, suddenly, impossibly, a teenage boy waiting in a sea of working women. He smiles at her and it's like the glow of a familiar story, the calm of walking down a familiar, sunlit road.

She runs to him, waving. "_Bolin_," she cries, breathlessly, "how'd you find me?"

He's as surprised as she. "I-I don't know, I was just walking by and I saw you and I just kind of, I don't know? Korra, what are you doing here?"

"Construction work," she says, eyeing him curiously, gauging his reaction. She's conscious of the peculiarity of her position, the muck on her face. Will he be disgusted by it, will he say she's too unladylike, that this is much too hard a task?

"That's incredible!" Bolin gushes, taking one of her hands between both of his, "You sure are one of a kind, Korra."

His expression is soft, and his tone is as tender as his touch, filling her with the warmth of sheepskin boots on a winter's night, with the sweetness of a fistful of fruit in her mouth. Korra blinks in surprise; then, slowly, she smiles.

"You know, bow tie, I get off work in fifteen minutes. Want to do something together?"

"Sure, yeah! Something! Together!" He leans in close to her, the distance between them shortening, light from the coming evening lending a sort of quiet beauty to the pair (_look at those two_, a wife laughs, nudging her working man); Bolin is still holding her hand.

"And, you know," he says, eyes bright, "I think I know the perfect place to go."


	10. Chapter 10

_**In the interim, while children play; something wicked this way comes**_

Mako boils three slightly overripe tomatoes in a pot until the turn soft, skins slipping off like clothes from eager lovers. He scoops them out of the water, removing red peels and white cores with a few twists of a knife. He is quiet, unnaturally so—a certain busboy has been gone long enough to cause unease; Mako's thoughts stray dangerously (_what if he's lost_), his hands shake, though they never slip off the blade. He turns his head up to the ceiling and exhales slowly; he decides to wait another half hour before going out to search. In the meantime, this brother busies himself with a recipe as familiar and as beloved to him as a mother's arms—elephant koi stew, Bolin's favorite.

Narook sits not far away, one eye on the door (_where's that boy_). He has their aging radio in his lap; he fiddles with the multi-colored dials like a child. Static fills the room, coloring the air with white noise, a background buzz like a robotic pulse.

"Do you want the news?" Mako asks, gently taking the radio from Narook's grasp. "Here, let me." Mako twists at the dials with the habitual manner of a city boy born and bred; Narook grew up surrounded by deathly oceans and homes of snow, but his surrogate son speaks the language of skyscrapers and combustion engines. Of course sharp-eyed Mako can find radio stations as easily as another boy can spot his beloved in a crowd.

"Thank you," Narook says, reaching up to squeeze the teenager's forearm. Mako sees in Narook's eyes a kind of balm, the paternal softness he prizes: _don't worry, he'll be home soon, Mako_. Mako nods, giving an old man the gift of his secretive smile.

_"...you for the weather. Umbrellas at the ready, summer showers are expected as early as next week. In other news, Love Amongst the Dragons begins its second season run in Ba Sing Se, critics are calling it—"_

Mako returns to the counter and begins slicing a onion marinated overnight in fennel and thyme, a handful of red peppers brought in from the golden tropics. He drops these ingredients into an iron pot, letting them fry for a few minutes. The air brims with fragrant warmth and glowing spice.

_"...Beifong clears gang hide-out with no police causalities, she could not be reached for comment but Captain Saikhan assures—"_

Narook watches Mako measure out five cups of clear broth, marveling at the docility of this yellow-eyed creature's actions. Usually Mako is bitterly abrasive, yelling at customers who mistakenly stumble into his kitchen, haggling fiercely with the greengrocer for the sake of few yuans. But here even dragons are at peace, it seems, his temperament tamed, his slim hands going through the motions with the pitiful tenderness men of his kind usually reserve for their wives. Or, in Mako's case, the tenderness that is typically set aside for a green-eyed brother.

Mako slides his knife into the elephant koi's side, relieving it of stomach and heart in quick succession, a little frown on his face. It reminds Narook of Water Tribe hunting rituals—slaying a caribou and then laying down weapons and clasping the hands to thank the spirits for this sustenance underneath a cold, bluish sun. A lamentable sort of sacredness. Mako is like that too: teeth bared, a fighter, but his is a sad touch, a martyr's heart.

_"...a report from our field reporter Chen describes farmers are leaving the countryside in droves, apparently spooked by strange happenings in the fields. No verification as of yet, but there are claims of entire hillsides filled with dead grass and dead flowers—"_

Narook stiffens, eyes widening. He takes in a sharp breath, a hand coming up to his chest. Mako notices and turns, wiping his fingers on his apron, leaving fingerprints of red like embroidered rose petals.

_"...very strange, brown and wilted, unusual for summertime. Increasing fog as—"_

"Narook, sir?" Mako asks, uncertain, concerned.

"It's nothing, it's not important, don't trouble yourself."

Mako covers the pot and leans on the wall, arms crossed across his chest. "It's no trouble," he says firmly. He looks searchingly at Narook, waiting for him to reveal the source of his discomfort.

Narook sighs. "It reminds me of Sedna, that's all. Before she passed she'd bend the water out of all the...all the flowers in the house."

Narook can cover his face, he can try to push it from him; but the vision of his wife will dog his mind's eye forever, the sight of her red hand twisting in the air, sucking the green life from the panda lilies at her bedside. Death is not always kind enough to preserve the sanity or the smile of those it visits. Mako knows this all too well. After all, a reaper marked him for her own the fall of his eighth year, the second he saw the light disappear from his mother's eyes.

"I understand," he says softly, "but that's not all, is it?"

Narook looks up at him in surprise. But he should know by now, that you can't keep a child like Mako in the dark. "No. I am...disturbed by these reports. We've been getting them all week. Farmers abandoning their livelihoods, dead fields, fog."

It reminds him of his childhood in the ice, the stories of grey happenings and dark mornings, spirits passing through the veil of mist to steal blue-eyed babies. These memories mix in with Sedna's face and voice, burrowing into him, her dark braids coiling and rotting inside him. He is Water Tribe through and through, and he has been taught to trust in the wisdom of countryside folk, he has been told to pay attention to patterns in the sky and disappearances in the forest. These strange accidents torture him: the last time flowers died, he lost a family. He knows that he would never survive this loss, were it to happen a second time.

"It's fine," Mako says, shaking his head dismissively, "it's just farmers' superstition."

Mako, child of the chockablock streets, the eternal skeptic; he won't believe in anything he cannot hold in his own two hands. And, more often than not, he is right. Narook tells himself to trust in the boy; he bites the inside of his mouth, trying to drive away Sedna's diseased wrists and the hillsides of dying flowers from his field of vision. _It's fine, it will be just fine. Let's just be happy again._

"Hey guys! Mako! Mister N!"

It's Bolin, his head poking through the door of the kitchen, curly hair falling in his eyes. The tension disappears, the radio news ends, replaced by a soft jazzy tune, a woman's crooning voice. "Oh, what are you making? Is it elephant koi stew? Yes!"

Mako breathes a sigh of relief. "_Finally._ What took you so long? I told you, if you're going to leave, you have to tell me _exactly_ when you're coming back."

"Sorry, I'm really sorry, bro." Bolin grins, poking his brother in the chest, right where he knows he's ticklish (_come on, why aren't you smiling, you big lug_). "Okay, I am sorry, I won't do it again."

Mako turns to his brother, stern. "Do you _promise? __Do you promise not to leave __again without telling me when you'll be back?_"

Two brothers, a small kitchen filled with the fricative consonants, a shared history, yellow-green glance and _you're the only one I can trust you know, stupid,_ the worth of a promise between boys (it's more than all the gold in Ba Sing Se); somehow Narook feels that if Bo only says _yes_, everything will be alright again, regardless of Sedna's flowers and the farmer's fields and all the scary stories, everything will be fine, he holds his breath—

"Yeah, I promise." They shake on it. Bolin ropes an arm around his brother's shoulders, telling some something in his usual cheery voice; Mako rolls his eyes, smiling, despite himself.

—an old man tips his head back, and breathes again.


	11. Chapter 11

_**Adventuring teenagers; the hidden talents of a common boy**_

A question, a question old as fire in the dark, primitive as rubbing two hands together for a little heat, a little substance, a little spark; a question spoken by milk-fed babes tugging at at a mother's skirt, by wide-eyed knights seeking treasure maps and reasons for living; a question born in innocence, bringing beginnings; the question that follows the pilgrim as he breaches a mountain and sees the slicing valleys and dipping hills that mark the journey ahead, a question—_where are we going?_

"Where are we going?" Korra asks, laughing, breaking into a run, one hand caught up in the warmth of a boy's fingers. For once she, an Avatar, the blessed prodigal daughter with the wisdom of a thousand gods, doesn't know where she goes—and the teenage waiter in the plaid apron who smells of ginger root and crushed mint and buckwheat, he is the child trusted with the answers.

"You'll see!" Bolin says cheerfully, looking back every so often to smile encouragingly at her. His eyes seem greener than usual, if such a biological miracle is possible, and the feel of this boyish gaze on her stirs something strange in her stomach (_a few hundred years from now, another Avatar will see a blinking emerald in a market stall, a green very similar to the sixteen-year-old Bo's eyes, and she will suddenly feel the ghost of Korra's young heart, and the skittering glee that accompanies adolescent sentiment_).

They race up the streets, underneath the glow of the dying evening sun, weaving through crowds of returning day laborers. They slip by young women burnt red by hours in the fields, factory workers with ruined hands and tongues black as pitch, businessmen spilling numbers like prayers: all the quiet denizens that sustain a city and its fledging monsters of industrial and technological revolution. The sky is filled with the smoke of their life blood and their daily talk (our heroes don't hear it, but one working man whispers to another: _didja read in the papers, those miles and miles of flowers gone black, with the water just comin' right outta them_—but these explanations will come later, let our kids laugh and be free of danger for as long as they are able).

After a childhood spent sprinting out of the arms of the local law enforcement, Bolin is quick on his feet, but she is not one to be bested by a mortal busboy: they run and run, as though pursuing hellhounds, as though chasing down the glories of myth, up and over rising slopes and under bridges, passing knee-deep in rainwater. They pass through short-cuts and jump over wire fences, egging each other on like the simpletons they are (_"betcha a set of noodles I can clear that pile of bricks and still beat you to the corner" "noodles, ha, by the time we're done the only thing you'll be eating is my dust!"_)

Bolin comes to a stop a few blocks away from the center of the city; they stand in a little side-street alone but for a few unattended flower pots above and a skinny stray cat sprawled on a stoop who eyes them with the casual disinterest so characteristic of felines. Hands on his knees, Bolin pauses to catch his breath (_"tired already, bow tie?" "yes ma'am"_) before pulling himself to full height and signalling at something in the distance.

"You seen this before?" He's pointing at the gigantic, glowing monument right up ahead, at the next corner; a famous landmark, major tourist attraction, and Republic City's architectural pride and joy.

"Uh-huh, I've already been to Sato Tower," Korra says, "Tenzin took me sight-seeing last week. Jinora told me all there is to know about it, too. It was built by Mister...something or the other Sato because he's… really rich or some such." She shrugs, raising her hand in an aimless, casual sort of wave. She is never purposefully indifferent, but the intentions of man seldom mean much to her, and she is not one to feign interest. Divinities, by their very nature, would rather speak than listen. "Tallest tower thing in the four nations."

"Ah-hah, that's where you're wrong," Bolin grins, "Sato Tower sure is big, but it's only the _second_ tallest."

Before Korra can roll her eyes and huff (_just_ _what_ _are you going on about_), Bolin takes a deep breath and strikes the ground with both feet, clumsily but energetically, ripping through the pavement and revealing, in a city's hidden sleeve of concrete, a passageway that dips deep down into the damp viscera of the earth. At this disturbance, the cat jumps up, glaring at Bolin with unconcealed irritation before settling down again.

"Ha, look at that!" Korra exclaims. Then she exhales sharply and turns to him, surprised. "Hey, wait a second, you can earthbend?"

"Only a little. Mostly I just make holes." There is a reason behind this: holes are easy to hide in (necessity is the mother of invention, and boys without mothers encounter necessity quite often). After all, Bolin's done more than his fair share of hiding (from police in the night, and gangsters with knives, from disconsolate dreaming and the interminable waits for _bro to come home_), though he doesn't tell Korra that. "I'm not good at it."

"You should have told me! I'll help you get better!"

Bolin shifts his feet, scratching his cheek and smiling at her a bit apologetically. "Thanks, but I'm not much of a bender, really. Anyway, that's not important right now." He gestures theatrically at the passage. "Ta-da! Ladies and gentleman! A secret tunnel!"

His distractions prove efficacious for his ends; Korra laughs, abandoning the topic of bending, much to his relief. "Where's it lead? Where are we going?"

He leans in close to her and lowers his voice to a whisper, twice the coquettish liberty; her proximity numbs his better senses, filling the crevices in his mind with dark honey and the gaps in his syntax with the breathy pauses common in the dumbstruck adolescent. But for a moment it seems the cosmos have grown grudgingly sympathetic towards a little boyish indiscretion, loosening Bo's tongue and giving him sufficient confidence to answer her with question with an open invitation (though perhaps it is Korra's own influence that imparts this confidence: the blue heat and gutsiness she exudes enveloping and uplifting his childish spirit; often it is friendship rather than the forces of the universe that change the malleable metal of the heart).

"What do you say," he starts, "to a little _adventuring?_"

Korra grins slowly, purposefully (the stray cat turns to look at her with some surprise—perhaps it senses something in this blue-eyed god or her trembling realm; animals often notice what people will not). She steps forward, lifts her arms and drops wordlessly into the hole, as simply as slipping into sleep, as easily as falling in love. The air in her wake, the street she leaves behind—these seem drier and colder for her absence, in Bolin's eyes. So it makes all the sense in the world to rush in, smiling despite the dark, and follow her.


	12. Chapter 12

_**Climbing up auroras; how far could we go, if we try**_

They walk down deep into the gut of the earth, tugged in by some primal call to adventure, the languorous mystery in jeopardy. Korra rushes forward; the backbone of her impatience is also the ancient thread of her life entire: the need to go and find, to get a good look at whatever she can get her hands on, come what may.

Bolin is a softer creature, a velveteen child, a presence marked by a patchwork of insecurity and anxiety that belies his false teenage bravado; he paws experimentally at the air, feeling the ground before each hesitant step. The dimness in the tunnel resurrects the open wounds in the mass of his memory: dog days of hunger, infants led by gangsters, all the things that go _thump_ in the night. But when it becomes too dark she snaps her fingers, bringing red fire to life in the heart of her palm, a flame of flushing color and thin petals, innocent as a lotus flower in her hand. Bolin smiles at the sight; the firelight worms it's way around Korra, displaying the sway of her arms, the the frame of her shoulders easing up and down in time with her easy breathing, the maple tints in her nymph's hair. He hadn't realized what a comfort she was—unabashedly tough and unreservedly confident Korra, squashing out his distress with just her proximity and a little trick of the light.

Bolin turns to the tunnel's walls, letting his fingertips drag along them as he walks. It has been some time since he has come here, but this underground tunnel is as familiar to him as a mother's delicate smile (soft and sweet as crumbling sugar, appearing and disappearing in his dreams). The memory that fills this black rock invades and permeates him all at once, a shock that revives both a decade's worth of recollection and the glowing rise of his own suppressed abilities.

He closes his eyes and presses his palms to the wall, his movements and heartbeat slowing, matching the unhurried pace of ocean currents. He feels his limbs spiral out; his core splits away from him and becomes a ribbon of silver, threading through the welcoming recesses of the rock. His surrender is met with a gift more precious than the yellow filaments of veins of gold. The earth peels and rids itself of artificial coats of ancient chemicals and glowing metals, offering him spongy warmth, the knowledge of this element deep and pure; a truth like wandering into the cooling rain, like watching a woman slip out of a silk kimono and lay herself out in lamplight. He calls out to Mother Earth, extending a hand, and she responds in kind, assembling and building herself into him, granting him underground wisdom and gumption. He feels this shift intensely and intimately, but only fleetingly; Bolin is but an inexperienced autodidact when it comes to earthbending.

And yet this natural kindness from a cold pit feeds and fills him. Earthbending is more than a knack he toys with during spells of boredom. For Bolin, who carried an invisible child's loneliness with him into young adulthood, bending is his own very human way of reminding himself of his own existence. After Mako, his companion by virtue of shared blood, and before Korra, the girl Avatar he knows but does not yet know: the Earth is his friend, the Earth is his childhood home.

He reaches to this friend now to feel the strength of its structure, assuring himself that it will stay up despite age and Korra's racing, thumping footsteps. _Will you hold up, even after all this time,_he sends this message though his skin into the map of Mother Earth's hidden heart, and she calls back, honeyed voice mingling with his blood: _of course. Who do you take me for._

"Bolin?" It's Korra, already two dozen paces ahead. She has turned to face him, hands on her hips, pursing her lips at her wayward busboy. "You slowpoke, are you _coming_already?"

"Yeah, yeah, bossy boots," Bolin yells, speeding up; he can almost feel her answering grin.

The tunnel opens up into a damp basement, several dozen feet underneath the street; they can vaguely hear the hurry and worry of pedestrian chaos from above. Korra is reminded of the ice caves of her youth, enormous mouths of glassy snow hanging over the dark ocean—this cavern of dirt-packed flooring and gunmetal ceilings is like their urban counterpart. Bolin walks a few paces and passes his hands over the walls, searching in the archives of both the rock and his own recollection.

"There's an entrance over here, if I remember right," Bolin tells Korra, "it always takes me awhile to work it open, think you could—"

Korra brushes past him and flicks her fingers lazily at the wall. The rocks part neatly, bending to her will without complaint, exposing a staircase.

"You were saying?" Korra blows imaginary smoke from her knuckles.

Bolin chuckles; the sound echoes, resonating in both room and blue-eyed rebel. "It's sure useful to have you around, Korra."

She grins foolishly at this, shrugging a little (_I know, doofus_).

"This stairway" he tells her, as they clamber up, "goes up for a little while, and then we reach a ground floor and from there on we have to climb up." If she is at all fazed by the challenge this poses, she does not say.

"What exactly are we climbing?"

"A tower. Well, I don't know if we can properly say it's a tower? It never got finished. The structure is here, all the metal and dirt and stuff," he suddenly remembers one of Mako's words, "the _scaffolding_, I mean, but it's not done. The biggest bit of it is actually covered in a tarpaulin and there's a building right in front that makes it hard to see, but it's here. It's just that no one really pays attention to it."

"Why'd they quit building it?" she asks, puzzled. In her experience, one ends what one starts.

Bolin pauses, momentarily at a loss. "I don't know," he starts, cautiously, "maybe it just happened. Maybe they didn't mean to leave it alone and unfinished, but they just forgot about it or couldn't be bothered anymore."

They reach the ground floor, and bold and brazen Korra stands dumbstruck at the metallic monster above them: a skeleton cast in iron turned orange-gold by years of sun and rain, reaching up into the darkening evening sky almost beseechingly, like a fervent pilgrim turning his face up to god. It's half-painted and clumsily wrapped in layers of bamboo scaffolding, a maze of steps and surfaces intertwined. Korra stops, still fearless but now unsure (_how do I get through that, should I burn my way through it_).

"I used to spend hours here," Bolin says suddenly. "I really loved it." He doesn't tell her the reasons: the sound of nearby construction drowned out the burst of slow starvation, the thirst for warmth, the quiet reminder of a phantom mother's cooling touch. He'd roam around, finding rhyme and reason in a hive of metal, crawling up the unfinished tower like similar children climb trees. With time, it became almost holy ground to him—and how could it not, this home held up in the contained brilliance of the sky, above those parts of the world that would hurt him, built and cared for by the solid and just earth, rooting him to a spot of safety.

Korra cannot know these things about him, but she sees their effect in the transformation of his face (_I really loved it_), and she feels ashamed of her initial thoughtlessness (_how could I ever destroy a place like this_).

She remembers her own girlhood: alone in a compound, nothing for miles but icebergs and the aurora. A beautiful creation, to be sure, but only an illusion of tenderness that fueled the bitter loneliness of her own heart. She thinks that maybe she wouldn't have minded a hide-out like this, somewhere to call her own.

"Let's get on up there," she says, new excitement taking root in her belly.

Bolin leads the way, relying on blurred but poignant memory (like a beloved family photograph run through with oxidation), stepping over ledges, clambering over ladders. Occasionally he stops to bend through an obstacle and feels Korra smoothly come to his aid from behind, moving what he cannot. Korra snaps her fingers and builds clever short-cuts, helping them along. They climb slowly but purposefully, both uncharacteristically quiet (_do they sense the landscape change around them as they reach higher and higher, do they feel awed by their evening exploits into the air blue as the sea's blood_).

Somehow they make it, Korra skirting around Bolin and pulling him up during the final stretch; it is nighttime, then, cold, and the sky drips with stars.

"Look," Bolin says, his voice turned immense in the empty space, "it's not a bad view, is it?"

She looks down from the stars and there it is: a city suffused in the plum-colored silk of evening, draped in the waning glow of an orange sun and the smoke that eases from lit factories, dotted with a chain of little streetlights turning on, guiding a hundred working fathers home to welcoming wives and children; a city like an ocean, the air like currents for dark birds and western winds, the tar and pavement like the grainy earth of the seabed, ripe with phosphorescent life.

"Wow," she whispers. This city alight is almost like the aurora she remembers, but different somehow, in some sacred way—there is warmth here, there is a world here beyond comfortable illusion, steeped in the lives of a hundred thousand people, eager to dig deep, to keep faith (_in me? thinks the Avatar a mile above the Earth_).

They stand there for a while—just how long, neither of them can say, time is not yet important—and they feel their disguised burdens lessen, transfigured into dust by the lazy movements of the dark storm clouds snaking through and the glow of the simple heroes below them.

Bolin watches Korra's profile, privately fascinated by the little changes in her expressions as she looks upon the land that is her unclaimed birthright; her features become a soft and diaphanous image hidden away in him, made holy by the feeling his child's heart still doesn't have the courage to name. She stretches her arms above her head, and then she turns to him; she smiles in her wolfish and lopsided way, and Bolin feels the lights from an entire city dim away for a brief moment in time.

"Ready to go home?" he asks her.

"The noodlery, you mean?"

He nods. "Mhm."

_Home_—how swifty and easily he includes her, completely without hesitation, into the house of his own keeping, of his own heart.

"Yeah," she agrees, reaching for his hand in the night, unafraid, so that he may show her the way down, "let's go home."


	13. Chapter 13

_**Nothing if not fair; the spirits who mourn, the spirits who roar**_

A curtain of blue-black is drawn; mist expands over a land caught between desire and duty, the territory of troublemakers who toy with time like wicked children, bursting it between their hands like ripe summertime fruit. These denizens roam according to their own whims, but always obeying the transparent laws of the universe that runs under men and monsters, those selfsame laws that they helped forge in quiet beginnings. In their passing, a world is birthed, and it grows swollen, like a drop of blood mixed into milk.

It is an unkind home, this realm of spirits. Stars breathe but the wind is knocked out of lungs, purest emotion is pulled up, cooked over hell-fire and poured into mortals below—but working hearts do not have a place here. Then again, what do spirits care? They lack both lungs and heart, they welcome the lessons of suffering. And, oh, they do suffer (but have no fear, they will exact their vengeance. Here's the first law of the universe: _what comes around, goes around_).

We find ourselves in a particular orbit in the sphere of the otherwordly; dark, dank, dangerous, the property of a creature both venomous and virtuous. A bone-breaker, a gut-grinder, a face-stealer. A tree older than the pit of the mountains and the froth of the sea stands in shade, sheltering him, or, perhaps, sheltering others from him.

A figure approaches, swathed in white, one hand on the rim of a silken hat: delicate dearest, stepping neatly over mutilated animals and dying roots. But despite her mannerisms and despite her name, she is no lady (red runs wild over her face, black fills her eyes like pooling rainwater in the dead of night, _the promise of things yet to come_).

She walks in silence, but she does not lack a companion. At one point she pauses and turns to assure herself that he is following. He is a little behind, distracted by a monkey who dances about him, crippled hands opening and closing in front of him like a magician's colored boxes (_is this pantomime a warning, what will come out when the magician licks his lips and tears open his tricks?_)

"Now, now, don't fret," she calls to him, "we're nearly there."

He studies her for a moment before accepting this with a nod. They continue on towards the tree; the primate goes quiet. If he is bothered by this, he gives no indication. Spirits conjure up the stuff of which he is made, they sow the watered-down truths from which he feeds—why fear his own maker?

She smiles, beckoning to him again. He quickens his pace, following the the dirt footsteps she has laid down (_don't fear your maker, unless she is also your reaper_), her own path to the slaughterhouse.


	14. Chapter 14

_**Morning chakras, anahata; Tenzin means well, sweetheart**_

He leads her outside, towards the cliffs. They leave the warm light of the temple behind, dipping into the green and golden line of sleepless trees. The terrain slips and swerves underfoot, turning treacherous, but Tenzin knows better than to offer her a helping hand. Korra the teenage god does not take kindly to gestures of guidance (_save that for the kids, Tenzin, I got this_).

He takes a good look at her face: unguarded eyes and unbrushed hair, fingers snapping along with the _thurr-ump_ of her step in the leaves. Tenzin shakes his head, smiling a little; he's given up on telling her to be just a little quieter, to watch where she walks. Oh, he could never say it in so many words, but she is but a child to him, still.

And yet, whatever his concerns, he doesn't really mind a child Avatar—her grin in the gardens, her fingers running around flowers like her eyes rush across the sky (_how far can I go_), the simplicity of her satisfaction, _things will be alright if I just promise._ After all, he only has to remember his father to know: gods are given so much, but only very rarely are they granted the gift of childhood.

It's a morning marked with the memory of last night's summer rain; the air is quiet and cool, a secret like new fruit, like a sleeping infant's cheek; the air swells and sidles up along the skin, curling up at the base of the spine, the glow of the river circling the mountain. Tenzin breathes in deep and feels the wind color his buttoned-up lungs grey-blue and sun-bright, easing up, helping him along.

Korra, however, doesn't seem to find the same comfort in her teacher's element. She grabs and gulps at the air, pushing her hands to all sides of her, dying to see it all stop and do her bidding. She's biting her lip, body tense like the pitch black core of a storm, arms twisting: all that earnest and honest, but ultimately misguided, anticipation. Tenzin can't help rolling his eyes.

"I'm not sure what you hope to gain with that, Korra, but it cannot be airbending."

"It's early," she complains, ignoring his barb entirely, "_way_ too early, Tenzin. Meditation never starts this early, even Jinora isn't up yet!"

"We're not meditating today, actually."

She looks at him in surprise. "No meditation?"

Tenzin smiles. "I thought we might break a little with tradition. You seem rather fond of that, after all."

They come to a stop close to the ocean, cutting past the boundary of the forest. Korra can hear the cry of the water's crash, familiar as a mother's voice; the roar seems tender to her, closer to her than even sunlight, the gut of the sea that is the bedrock of her birth. Tenzin notices her expression soften and murmurs a little _thank you_ to Pema for suggesting the location ("_she likes the water an awful lot, you know, you might find her a little more accommodating if she feels at peace"_). How wise she is, that wife of his.

"We're going to talk for a while, before training begins." Tenzin settles onto the ground, and his charge follows suit. "What do you think about that, Korra?"

She frowns. "Am I in trouble? I swear I'm not really responsible for feeding Oogi the sugar cubes, and even if I am kind of responsible I swear I'm only really _half_-responsible because—"

"No, Korra, you're not—wait, is that why he was so excitable yesterday? Korra, the animals are _not playthings…_anyway, forget that, it's not important. You're not in trouble. We're just going to talk about bending. Airbending, to be precise."

Korra squirms, pouting theatrically. "That's a waste of time, Tenzin. I know everything there is to know. I just _can't_…do it."

"Now, now, hear me out here." Tenzin pats her shoulder encouragingly, and she stops, shrugs, her face still fitful, eyes filled with the hesitation of the switch in seasons. But she keeps silent which, when it comes to this little god, means: _okay, I'll listen for a while_.

Tenzin places a hand over the center of his chest, the red-gold of his history and home; he looks searchingly at her. "Do you know what this is?"

"That's your heart, Tenzin. Very cute."

He skirts around her sarcasm, waving the comment away. "Not just a heart, Korra. It's a chakra."

"Oh, _chakras_. I know all that. I got lessons in the compound. _Relative Anatomic Positions of Chakras_, super boring. No offense, Tenzin."

He sighs, reaching up to tug at his beard. "Perhaps your education in this respect has been more technical than you require. But try to give it another go. What's a chakra, Korra?"

Korra pauses, thinking. "It's, um, a pool of energy? There are several, located in the body, and they concentrate power. Each one is associated with bending, or some kind of energy, and together they make the Avatar State possible."

"That's very good, Korra. Now, do you know which chakra this one is?" He points again to his chest.

She mimics his motion, her hand a mirror image, the young deity and her teacher, the old god and her keeper. "_This_ chakra?"

"The heart belongs to _anahata_. The airbending chakra."

"Ah," she says, gripping tighter, voice going quieter, like the dying light of a closing day, "that's right. I remember now."

"_Anahata_, near the spine, symbolizing selflessness, dealing with love, blocked by grief," Tenzin continues, choosing his words with care, "in the ancient books it's shaped like a flower, grey and red. _Anahata,_" he repeats, "emotion in raw form."

What Tenzin does not say: chakras mark the texture and nature of humanity, those wells of soft color and ache, giving a world substance, giving love and loss weight. Chakras: feeding on feeling, relishing the patchwork map of the body, hiding in the hills and dips of an arm, a hip, breathing in life, to gods and babies alike. Anahata: grief, love, a pair of near opposite and yet infinitely complimentary conditions, woven into the living world in which one learns, in which one burns.

He fears that Korra, seventeen years old and fresh from the constrictions of the compound, cannot allow herself grief nor love because she has never been allowed the chance to live. He wonders if the veins of her bending are split by the holes in her experience. If so, how to correct it?

"Maybe, knowing what you do about this chakra, you should concentrate upon the instances in which you have felt emotion. Very deep sorrow, attachment, compassion. Just hold the memory in your mind, for a little while. Think of it in grander ways than you have before." He's unsure how she will take this vague direction, but he hopes that she will understand, somehow.

The spine, the ocean, a flower colored like smoke and blood, grief, love, ways grander than she knows. Korra looks out at the water, she closes her eyes_. _

_Grief_: her mother's handwriting three times a month, letters she'd read in the dark, letters she'd press to her face (_I'm sorry your father and I can't visit, your training is important, sweetheart_); a thousand miles, monsters of snow and cold, an alleyway, a white bun in dirty hands, _why, why can't I, I should be able to, I'm so—_

But also_—Love_: sweet-eyed Ma and Pa, a warm dog she named, a master and wife, their chirruping children, the ocean in her window, building a home, a city, a bowl of broth during cold evenings, a bow-tie, a busboy.

"Korra?"

"Mhm?"

"Korra," he says softly, "do you know what _anahata _means?"

She shakes her head, leaning in, opening her eyes. Tenzin sees blue gleam, some seam of a star split open, the crinkles of his father's face when he would smile, reproduced exactly in the child born upon his death.

"It means, 'unbeaten'."

The wind returns, the day draws on up over the cover of trees, getting caught in her hair. Korra breathes out slowly, looking out again at the water; in her field of vision lies the wisdom of a thousand gods of motion and feeling, a thousand contained heartbeats lost over the surface of the ocean, and then folded up and kept safe in her able heart. Then she looks once more at him and slowly, she smiles.


	15. Chapter 15

_A/N: Uh, hi there, readers! My most sincere apologies for the long wait! Um. I'm not sure what else to add. What do people typically write in these author note thingamabobs? Hello? How are you? Comments appreciated? Have a lovely day? All of the above?_

_**Little birds of mud, pale gold of your bones; never this sadness; stronger still**_

It is raining in Republic City. It had started slow, in the late morning, smooth, soft, fragrant; as though some young ocean spirit were stretching her long, rounded arms, leaning down to pass her river-wet hands over the yellow-green earth, thumbing at the housetops and mountainsides lazily, with fingers dusted with stars and seeds.

But by mid-afternoon the wind from the bay rolls in, gains momentum; this spirit is no saving grace, not any longer. The gray-metal rain hits hard, a wild animal preying on the fleshly soil with thick and lightless jaws; it grows dark, quick as magic, like a thief in the dead of night, robbing them blind. Mothers open windows and scream for their children, calling them back from the streets where they play; they listen, and they hurry home, frightened, but quiet.

Bolin is sitting in the alleyway behind the noodlery, leaning against the wall, his hair darkening in the rain. If Mako were here, he'd huff, yell maybe, pull him inside, onto the floor, rub his face dry with his shirtsleeves. _Bo, you dumb oaf. Bo, if you'd caught cold. Bo, if you'd fallen ill._ Mako and his string of increasingly dire, increasingly loud hypotheticals (_what if you'd had to stay in bed for a month!_), all that fussing making his little bright-eyed brother grin.

But Mako is not here, and the air and heat are gone from Bolin's chest, replaced with images like rivers of hot iron, poured into his body and left to harden in the milk of his bones. Oh, he doesn't really want to, but of course he does remember: the slender hands, bent back on the dirt in the alleyway, blood pooling, matting in long hair, the look of her, the strange smallness of her curled-up form softened and liquefied but not erased by time, memory dissolving into his heart, solidifying there –

– _A strike, at the breastbone, one-two, hit the heart, fast, so fast – how? Mama? – one second the street, asleep, Bo rubbing his cheek on his brother's leg, Bo, quit it, that tickles, the linen sweet-smelling and soft, and the next oh, oh –_

– _Mako covering his eyes, but not before, not before – _

– _Mama has red all down her neck and in her hair, and Papa is face-down in the dirt, playing hide-and-go-seek, right, Mako? and there's a rush of bright, unbearable fever-heat rising up his neck, solid and thick, his legs crumpling easy, don't look, I said__,__ don't look, Mako picking him up, tripping, a ringing in Bolin's head as he hits the ground, sobs, until Mako grabs him and gets up again, again, runs, runs, the rain coming at them from all sides, filling Bo's line of vision but still allowing him to see, as Mako runs ahead –_

– _the __slope of her shoulder, line of her arm, both broken at angles, he remembers this – but what was the color of her eyes, again? Those tears in her dress, like ancient fault lines underneath the rind of the earth, slicing, from hip to collar – but what was the color of her eyes, again?_

Bolin puts his head in his hands, but he can't stop it. Rainy evenings like these, so overrun and interwoven into him, bring the memory back with an accuracy and efficiency that stuns him, bowls him over. Maybe it's because he was so young, when it happened; maybe it's because he is so young, now.

He knows that, if he knew, Mako could help him. Mako's yellow eyes and sticky warmth, constant, steady, a summer day, a stovetop, his arms and hands that carry Bo through darkness better than any god – Mako would help him. _But __I'm an adult now, _he tells himself, repeating it so it'll sink in, so he won't falter. _I'm an adult._ He knows for sure that he must never let Mako see him cry again. He tries to calm himself, his breaths shallow and dry (_eyes, eyes, stop, never again, never again_).

"Bo? Bolin? Hey, Bo?"

Her voice appears so suddenly, so cruelly, in the hollow of his newly reduced world, in the carved-out sacredness of this past memory, this past ghost of a dead mother. His stripped-down heart and this wound-up secret already coexist so dangerously that the appearance of his name, from her mouth, bringing him back to the present moment, to Korra, who stands over him – it terrifies him beyond belief. Panicked, he registers her confused expression, her frown. He doesn't know what to do, he's about to make a break for it when he realizes something is very different: he can't feel the rain anymore.

He cannot feel the rain because Korra's hands are held over him, stopping it, keeping it suspended in the air. In an instant Bolin's fear is transfigured into empty smoke, replaced by wonder, and the metals swimming in him turn into pale, weightless gold; all by the smallest, most tender movement of her hands.

"You...okay?"

Korra looks at his hair, soaked through, the deep creases around his brows; his eyes remind her suddenly of a forgotten shipwreck she'd found, once, rotting on the seashore, the hull splitting, its wood swelling and cracking under the water. Her concern deepens into real worry, a painful, newborn burst in her belly.

It's impossible to believe. After all, this boy, this funny boy she knows is always smiling; he is extravagant to the point of absurdity, playfully dramatic, possessed by flights of fancy and offers to go here or there, pleas to do this or that; never this sadness. Never this sadness.

"I'm f-fine," he hiccups. "Really." He turns his face; he won't look at her.

She thinks of Bolin running, pouting when she's beat him (_fair and square, busboy!_), laughing when she makes faces behind Mako's back, so loud the whole neighborhood must know, Bolin scalding the pot so bad they have to throw it out, showing her the best place to watch the tide come in; Bolin sitting cross-legged, making sloppy little birds out of mud for slumchildren, smiling when she bends their wings and eases them into the air, letting them fly.

A well within her, deep and deserted, breaks and opens.

She crouches down, onto her haunches, eye-level with him. It's dry, and quiet, around them; Korra will die before she lets the rain near him again. He can't even hear it, anymore; Korra magnifies, she intensifies everything around her, drawing him away from wounded brothers, wasted blood.

"I don't know how to help," she says flatly, honestly, "but I want to. Would you let me?"

She smiles a little at him, unsure but determined; grief steps on his spine, overwhelming and overrunning him. He doesn't say anything. Instead, he leans forward, hesitant (she doesn't back away, miracle of miracles). Korra lets him rest his head on her shoulder. She's unpracticed, but hers is the kind of compassion that feeds a world entire, and now, in this dead hour, it softens and centers on him; white carnations are born where her fingertips trace the outlines of his bones, a path of milky light along his temples where her breath brushes against his skin.

Her hands come down, forgetting the rain, to shelter his shoulder blades, they are warm, strong. Bolin, tucked in close against her, can hear her heartbeat; it is stronger still.


End file.
